Over the past few months, industry and government have pledged more than $500-million toward AI, a commitment that has led to the rise of powerful institutions such as the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, the Vector Institute and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. These structures are well positioned to keep churning out cutting-edge research, train the next generation of AI leaders, and advance the innovation and technology transfer of AI. Our three AI Institutes are set up to offer Canadian businesses similar training programs and there's good reason for them to use these resources: Canadian enterprises that consider investing in state-of-the-art machine-learning and data infrastructure can enjoy results such as increased efficiency in manufacturing, better management of underwriting risk, minimization of fraud and reduction of health-care costs. Among the most urgent are ensuring the market is well supplied by streamlining immigration, ensuring higher education and industrial research-funding programs are well capitalized and targeted, modifying tax policies to encourage entrepreneurship and streamlining research and development tax credits to support AI investments.

DeepMind, Google's London-based artificial intelligence research branch, is launching a team at the University of Alberta in Canada. DeepMind is launching a team at the university partly for proximity to the broader AI research community in Canada. A number of leading AI researchers in Silicon Valley hail from Canada, where they plugged away at deep learning, a complex automated process of data analysis, during a period when that technology -- now popular at major tech companies -- was considered by the larger computer science community to be a dead end. Plus, almost a dozen DeepMind staff came from the university, according to a blog post by DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis announcing the new lab. An Alberta PhD and a former post doc from the school played key roles in one of DeepMind's hallmark accomplishments, getting its AlphaGo software to beat the human world champion at Chinese strategy game Go. "Our hope is that this collaboration will help turbocharge Edmonton's growth as a technology and research hub," wrote Hassabis, "attracting even more world-class AI researchers to the region and helping to keep them there too."

What if an algorithm could tell you whether you have cancer based on your CT scan or mammography exam? While I am certain that radiologists' creative work will be necessary in the future to solve complex issues and supervising diagnostic processes; AI will definitely become part of their daily routine in diagnosing simpler cases and taking over repetitive tasks. So rather than getting threatened by it, we should familiarize with how it could help change the course of radiology for the better. There is a lot of hype and plenty of fear around artificial intelligence and its impact on the future of healthcare. There are many signs pointing towards the fact that AI will completely move the world of medicine.

Mucktarr Darboe, an education and science ministry director, said after Thursday's interview at the U.S. Embassy the students were given visa letters and will pick them up Monday. Darboe said he was denied one because the U.S. is not currently granting visas to Gambian government officials. The team will be met by the Gambian American Association in Washington.

"In the nearest future we plan to unveil a whole line of neural network based products. A fully automated combat module based on that technology is to be unveiled during the ARMY-2017 forum," communications director of Kalashnikov Concern Sofiya Ivanova told TASS. Neural network technologies allow the module to identify targets and make decisions on its own, according to Ivanova. It remains unclear whether the module will actually open fire on its own or wait for a human to authorize it. Artificial neural networks are computing systems inspired by biological neural networks, e. g. actual brains.

In a bid to make its armed forces look even more intimidating, Russia has taken inspiration from science-fiction to create some futuristic-looking new combat suits. Developed by the state-owned Central Research Institute for Precision Machine Building, this very Star Wars-esque combat armor features a powered exoskeleton, ballistic protection from bullets and shrapnel and a heads-up display. While just a concept at the moment, the suit's designers hope it will enter full production in the next few years. While they haven't detailed what the heads-up display would be used for, the combat armor's powered exoskeleton helps the wearer carry heavy loads, bearing some of the brunt to lower the soldiers' fatigue. While its designers have clearly spent a lot of time playing video games, we've already seen that Russia's not alone in its bid to create an army of Master Chiefs.

Its DeepMind subsidiary has announced plans to expand its operations to Canada in order to accommodate the company's ever-growing research initiatives. "It was a big decision for us to open our first non-UK research lab," Hassabis said. "[W]e've had particularly strong links with the UAlberta for many years: nearly a dozen of its outstanding graduates have joined us at DeepMind, and we've sponsored the machine learning lab to provide additional funding for PhDs over the past few years." Over the past year, DeepMind has consistently made headlines with its impressive AlphaGo AI, which has so far wrecked legendary Go players, learned how to improve itself without human input, and sworn to cure cancer.

While the future promised by films such as Minority Report remains a fantasy, advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) make a world where computers outsmart humans seem increasingly likely. Computer security is an arena that would be an obvious benefactor from AI. Computer code is riddled with flaws because it is inherently complex, poorly documented and of course…written by humans. Today, it is largely the task of humans to root out those same flaws and patch them – a costly and time-consuming process that ensures a large window of opportunity for hackers, should they uncover those flaws before they can be addressed. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was so interested in the potential impact of AI on computer security that it was willing to place a £44M bet to find out what that potential was. It held the Cyber Grand Challenge at the famed DEFCON security conference last summer with £4M in prize money on the line.

It's rare for Canadians to come out and assert global leadership in anything (barring hockey and winter coats), but here we are, on the brink of adding artificial intelligence (AI) to the list. This is no small measure. It requires us to move away from the understated modesty that often defines our national character and demands that we take action to be able to declare our place on the world stage. Thankfully, we have the goods to declare. Seminal breakthroughs such as deep learning and reinforcement learning, which have resulted in unprecedented technological transformation and are currently fuelling the AI engine, were brought to life by Canadian universities.

Google and Facebook are household names around the world. Ya-Qin Zhang, president of China's leading search business, says Chinese companies can become worldwide Internet powerhouses too. One of the biggest fish in China's market of 730 million Internet users, Baidu is trying to open new revenue streams both domestically and abroad by investing heavily in artificial intelligence. The company employs more than 1,700 AI researchers, including some at a Silicon Valley research center opened in 2014, and was chosen by the Chinese government to run a new national lab intended to make the nation more competitive in machine learning. Zhang even predicts that the self-driving cars Baidu is developing might be in widespread public use before those introduced by U.S. competitors.